General tips:
- Do not display your entire email address on your website, public forums, or whatever form online as it can be collected by robots and added to spam mailing lists. Instead, use this format: you [AT] domain.com ( instead of user@domain.com) to trick robots.
- Enable identity protection service on your domain name (available from My Domains' page) to hide your email address from the public database (also known as WHOIS).
- Do not subscribe to any mailing lists without knowing the way your email address is going to be diffused. ( or even sold!).
- Do not respond to unsolicited emails.
- Do not click on links in SPAM.
Minimize SPAM with cPanel in a Web Hosting:
The following steps are recommended:
(1) Enable the anti-spam software SpamAssassin or change its setting.
With SpamAssasin, every single email received is graded from 1 to 10 wherein 10= obvious spam and 1 = legitimate email. You can then decide whether to delete or save as junk every message with a high grade. In order to change SpamAssasin's setting:
- log in web hosting control panel, .i.e. cPanel.
- Click on Apache SpamAssassin within the Mail area.
- Make sure that Apache SpamAssassin™ is marked as being currently enabled on the top of the page.If it is disabled, click on Enable SpamAssassin™ to instantly enable it.
- Go back to the Home Page of SpamAssassin tool, scroll down and click on Configure Apache SpamAssassin™.
- Within the section required_score, enter the desired scoreto filter out spam.Note that:
- The higher the score, the less strict the filtering.
- A score of 5 is recommended and enabled by default.
- A score of 0 will select all received messages as spam.
- A score of 10 will allow the reception of the majority of messages including propable SPAM.
- Scroll down and click on save, then return to SpamAssasin tool's Home Page.
- You can optionally now enable Spam Box (recommended) to deliver the messages that were marked as spam in a specific folder entitled spam. You can then check the messages within this folder using your webmail or through your configured mail client. To enable SpamBoxn scroll down until the section Spam Box and hence click on Enable Spam Box.
- Finally, You can configure an automatic removal of emails that exceeds a given spam score. Be careful while using this set up because you can't check deleted emails. It is thus recommended to configure a conservative score starting from 9 or beyond to not loose legitimate emails. To enable automatic Spam suppression.
- Scroll down to the section Filters and select a score between 1 and 10. Note: 5 is the default setting. The higher the number, the more conservative the setting.
- Click on Auto-delete Spam to enable the option.
The option of the default address is used to redirect whatever sent email to an inexistent receiver on your domain to a valid email address.though useful, this option can occasion a significant amout of Spam. The recommended configuration is already set up on your web hosting account.
- In the cPanel, under E-MAIL, click on Default Address.
- Select the relevant domain in the list box entitled Default Address Maintenance and make sure that the option Discard the message while your server processes it by SMTP time with an error message is active by default.
- Click on change.
(3) Activate SPF & DKIM configuration in your DNS.
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) defines the servers or the authorized IP adresses to send emails from your domain name. It is a tool to prevent counterfeit emails from your domain name. To activate SPF & DKIM on your domain, refer to the following article http://clients.whc.ca/knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&id=115&language=english
In activating the above mentionned options and in talking the necessary precautions, you can limit the amout of received spam over 90%.
